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Musings on the Eternal Console Wars

I showed up at Target a few Sundays ago and stood in the cold for about an
hour to try to get a Nintendo Wii. I had number 42. Unfortunately, they only
had 41 of them.

Ouch.

Through some machinations and good luck, however, I managed to pick up a Wii
the other weekend. My “real” review of the box (and some of the games) will be
in Played To Death’s holiday issue, but I have a few philosophical ponderings
to share here. First, and most importantly, the name doesn’t really sound any
less stupid the more you say it. But in a way, that’s comforting. For any
given thing you can buy, there’s always something stupid or brain-dead about
it. In the case of the Nintendo Wii, we know the answer up front: it has a
painfully stupid name.

The console itself is nice looking (if a bit bland) and petite. The control is
odd. It manages to be both more precise and less accurate at the same time:
I’m constantly astonished that the cursor managed to hit what I intended, but
even with the remote braced against a hard surface, the cursor always seems
ready to slip away from me like the fish in Fool’s Errand. The ergonomics of
the controllers themselves, though, are great. Nintendo deserves praise if for
no reason other than liberating us from the Playstation-style dual-handed
rosary. Friends and family who would never touch an Xbox seem to have no
problem with the Wii: the remote is approachable, and everyone who has ever
used a mouse is familiar with “Move your whole hand this way to move the
pointer.”

If they can manage to make enough of them, I think we can state confidently
that Nintendo has defeated Sony in hand-to-hand combat for this round of the
console wars. They’ve basically taken a Gamecube, revved it just a little, and
given it a nifty control scheme. They combined this with an interesting
smattering of launch titles taken from their console legacy (Zelda) and
their handheld library (Trauma Center) Then, they are selling this device
for just about one-third of what Sony is charging for a larger, heavier,
uglier device that has features no one wants and games no one cares about.
Basically, Sony has managed to use all of their engineering and marketing
prowess to launch a new version of the Atari 5200, only with fewer games.
Nintendo, meanwhile, has done something practically unheard of in the console
space: they’ve innovated.

What’s particularly saucy about Nintendo’s innovation is that it is in your
face. Game publishers, as I have mentioned before, hate and fear
innovation. Microsoft’s
decision to include a hard drive in the original Xbox cost them millions of
dollars, and the only reason they did it was the game publishers, lying like
pregnant Catholic schoolgirls, swore up, down, left, and right that they would
make games for the Xbox that could only work with a hard drive. Then they
treated the hard drive like a glorified memory card for the life of the
console, and ported all their games to the PS2. With the Wii, Nintendo has
placed the innovation right in the user’s hand. There is absolutely no
avoiding it.

There will be game developers who make games for the Wii that don’t actually
use the controllers in any interesting way. These developers will be sad,
because no one in the entire world is going to buy their games. If you release
a game for the Wii that doesn’t use the controller in some interesting way,
legions of twentysomethings around the world are going to stop referring to
your company by its trademarked name, and will instead just use the shorthand
“those retards.”

So, in summary: Microsoft’s innovation in this cycle centers around online
play. Sony’s innovation centers around making their game machine stupidly
expensive so that it can play movies. Nintendo’s innovation centers around
their wireless motion-sensing controller. No one can promise us that future
Wii games will be any good.

But for now, I have an Xbox 360, and I have a Wii, and I have no intention of
buying a PS3 any time in the next year.